Banksy’s role in what he’s calling the ‘Cans Festival’ is more executive than anything else, as he moves around directing various pieces. I have interrupted him at work on a sculpture called ‘CCTreeV’ involving dozens of fake security cameras. Before that, he was busy putting a Noddy car up on bricks.

When he arrived at Leake Street, Banksy’s biggest worry was the homeless men living there.

‘I didn’t want to just kick them out,’ he says. ‘Firstly it was their home, and secondly they were quite scary.

'We offered to put them up in a YMCA, but they just said, ‘Don’t worry about it’, and moved on to somewhere else.

'We’ve got this for six months, at which point Eurostar have told us they want it returned in the exact state we got it. So we’ll have to go find those guys and bring them back, I guess.’

They’ll also have to painstakingly urinate on the walls and bring back all the used needles.

It seems a shame, to say the least. ‘This street must be worth millions now,’ I point out, remembering that earlier this year one of Banksy’s quick urban paint jobs sold for £950,000 at Sotheby’s, New York. But the point of the Cans Festival is that it’s not for profit; this time, nothing is for sale.

‘We’re only flogging programmes for £3, and we’ll be very lucky to break even,’ Banksy states proudly.

‘It’s been quite an expensive project – we’ve flown artists in from 11 countries, and it’s not cheap to rent a road!